Interviews

Age of Conan -- Separate Tracks with Gaute Godager

GameSpy talks with Gaute Godager about PvP, PvE, and everything in between in the upcoming Age of Conan.

"It's all about the balance," Gaute Godager says to me as he pulls the curtain closed on a nondescript conference room.

I've come to Oslo, Norway, to visit Funcom, the Scandinavian game developer perhaps best known for their MMO Anarchy Online. Anarchy Online, of course, has become famous as the game with arguably the worst launch and one of the more remarkable turnarounds in MMO history. In fact, the game remains successful and even profitable today in the face of modern competitors like World of Warcraft because the company was willing to experiment by making the game free and supporting it with in-game advertising.

According to Godager, the development team took a lot of lessons from Anarchy Online while they were developing Age of Conan. "Having a successful MMO as been an enormous advantage for us," Godager said. "It's a pretty eye-opening experience when what you think you know about how players play MMOs runs into actual data taken from a running game." In fact, one of the biggest lessons that the team learned is that what some players say they want, isn't always what everyone really needs.

"The PvP vs. PvE debate was, is, and always will be one of the biggest headaches any developer has to deal with," Godager said. He's not exaggerating. One of the most contentious discussions on any MMO message board is exactly what the rules for player vs. player combat should be. On the one side are those players who believe in universal PvP, that no place should be safe. The whole point, they say, of being online with thousands of other players is to be able to test yourself against them. Others, wary of getting "ganked" or "griefed" by obnoxious players when they're not ready for it, feel that MMOs should be a more cooperative venture, with players working with each other against the environment. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of the debate, but the basic camps have long been established.

Given the brutal nature of the Conan license and the team's desire to totally revamp the way combat in an MMO works, this question was foremost on the team's mind when they sat down to think about how they were going to implement fighting in the game. "Our first thought was how were we going to balance out the expectations between the two camps," Godager said. The world of Conan is one where combat is frequent, fierce, and unbelievably bloody. It wouldn't be terribly true to the universe if there was a class of foes the player couldn't fight with just because they happened to be played by other humans. On the other hand, there needed to be some restrictions because, in the end, Age of Conan is a game, not a social experiment, and players need to have enough structure to get on with the questing and monster killing at the heart of the genre.

What was the team to do then? Funcom pulled out an old strategic chestnut -- if you can't see your way past a problem, try enlarging it to get a better sense of perspective. "What we realized was the issue wasn't really about the conflicting expectations of PvP and PvE gamers -- it was really about defining why people play MMOs the way they do." Here, once again, having access to the Anarchy Online player base would come in extremely handy. The team's revelation was that there really isn't as much difference between PvE and PvP players as the level of rancor would lead one to believe.